Sydney Page<\/p>\n
Chelsey Brown was at a Manhattan flea market last year when she saw an old handwritten letter. On a whim, she decided, \u201cI\u2019m just going to buy this item for a dollar, take it home with me, and try to trace it\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Within half an hour on a genealogy site back at her New York City apartment, she found the descendants of the person to whom the letter was addressed. She reached out to them and offered the long-lost letter, which they enthusiastically accepted.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom that moment on, I just never stopped,\u201d said Brown, 28, explaining her unusual hobby.<\/p>\n
To date, she has returned hundreds of heirlooms; she stopped counting after she hit 190 in September.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
As an interior designer specialising in budget-friendly decorating, Brown has long been a flea market fanatic. Now, though, she primarily uses her thrifting skills to sleuth for meaningful mementos – and reunite forgotten family heirlooms with their rightful owners.<\/p>\n
She and her father, who is a trained genealogist, started working on genealogy cases as a father-daughter duo in 2019. They began with finding the family of a baby girl who was buried in 1938 in a New York cemetery, right next to Brown\u2019s grandparents.<\/p>\n
The Browns made it their mission to trace the baby girl\u2019s lineage, and eventually they were able to find her living relatives, who knew she existed but did not know where she was buried. In an email response to the Browns, the baby\u2019s niece said she was grateful to finally be able to visit the grave.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cNow she does not have to be alone,\u201d the niece wrote to the Browns, they said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s when it all started for me,\u201d Chelsey Brown said. \u201cThose reactions are exactly what fuel me. That\u2019s why I keep doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Each weekend, Brown visits thrift stores in search of heirlooms such as long-lost love letters, books, high school diplomas and photo albums, which usually cost her between $1 to $5 each, depending on the vendor and the item. Brown covers the cost of the objects, as well as the postage fees to mail them to the descendants, which is usually an additional $8. She estimates she\u2019s spent thousands of dollars on returns at this point.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s something I love doing, and I\u2019m happy to pay for it,\u201d Brown said, adding that she had also partnered with MyHeritage, a genealogy platform, to work on some research projects.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing quite like the feeling of satisfaction that comes from returning a lost item to its owner,\u201d said Roi Mandel, director of research at MyHeritage.<\/p>\n Brown said she was able to track down the descendants of about 80% of the items she found, as she typically opted exclusively for things that contained some form of a clue, be it a name, date or other identifying marker. She then uses MyHeritage to build a family tree and scour for potential descendants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Recently, she found an old Valentine\u2019s Day card written by a woman to her husband, and returned it to the couple\u2019s granddaughter. She also returned love letters from the 1960s to the woman to whom they were originally written – marking the first time Brown gave back an item to its original owner and not a descendant. She is now working on returning a baby journal from 1908.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s an element of mystery to it,\u201d Brown said. \u201cEvery possible story you can think of, I have probably come across it. It\u2019s all about finding magic in everyday human lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Of the hundreds of heirlooms she has collected so far, \u201cthere has not been one person that hasn\u2019t wanted an item I\u2019ve found,\u201d Brown said. \u201cThat says something.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mary Jane Scott, who grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and now lives in Columbia, South Carolina, was one of Brown\u2019s recipients of a long-lost heirloom. She received a message from Brown around Thanksgiving last year, asking if she was related to Hans Wittstock – who, indeed, was her grandfather.<\/p>\n Brown explained that she had retrieved ration books from World War II belonging to Hans Wittstock and other members of his family.<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d said Scott, 72. \u201cI was tremendously excited. I couldn\u2019t believe she would take the time to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Given that the holiday season was approaching at that time, \u201cit was like a present,\u201d Scott said. \u201cWe spent a lot of Christmases with my grandparents.\u201d<\/p>\n Evan Konecky, who lives in Seattle, was equally thrilled to receive an unexpected message from Brown, explaining that she had found a letter addressed to Konecky\u2019s mother from the late 1940s.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a bit of a miracle,\u201d said Konecky, 68.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Although Konecky does not know who the letter came from, the sender \u201cdoes thank my mother for her generosity and kindness, so I know it was real,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt brought my sweet mom back to me for those minutes when I held that letter in my hand and was able to read it,\u201d Konecky said. \u201cChelsey seems to derive a great amount of pleasure, but I think it\u2019s nothing compared with the pleasure that she gives the recipients of these long-lost memories.\u201d<\/p>\n Brown credits her father with getting her interested in the pursuit. For the past 25 years, he has had a personal pastime of helping strangers uncover their lineage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe has taught me so much,\u201d Brown said of her father, who lives in Falls Church, Virginia, where she grew up and still regularly visits to see family and scavenge for more relics.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there must be something in our genetics that we have a shared excitement about genealogy,\u201d said Bruce Brown, 75. \u201cChelsey is experiencing the same joy I do.\u201d<\/p>\n She said she wholeheartedly agreed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThese aren\u2019t just items,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re treasures.\u201d<\/p>\n Washington Post<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sydney Page Chelsey Brown was at a Manhattan flea market last year when she saw an old handwritten letter. On a whim, she decided, \u201cI\u2019m just going to buy this item for a dollar, take it home with me, and try to trace it\u201d. Within half an hour on a genealogy site back at her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":751060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-751059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=751059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=751059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=751059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=751059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/eb1dd849-e440-5aae-aac2-7ecd4c338290&operation=CROP&offset=0x0&resize=683x527.jpg\")
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